Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ksk 4054 days ago
All that is nice, but simply stating the reasons does not cause me to think that something is actually beneficial in a way thats real and tangible to me. In practice, I often find that disabling analytics scripts improves the performance of many websites. My RAM and CPU usage goes down, and the site feels much more responsive. Other times, disabling JS completely causes websites to fall back to their html/non-js pages, which are significantly better to me from a performance standpoint. YMMV.

Nothing against websites who are trying to improve user experience, but if I'm donating my CPU time and RAM for someone else's business needs, I'd want a way for me to opt out of that.
1 comments
drstewart 4053 days ago
To piggyback on this, does anyone have any metrics on how much time is taken up by restaurant servers asking me how my food is today? I'm paying for the food and drinks, not to be spammed for analytics by the server.
link
seanp2k2 4053 days ago
It seems like they could collect those metrics on the back-end (kitchen / food processor(s)) too, or use tip % as a proxy metric for QoS. Not sure how they'd track e.g. CTR, but straight conversions could be easy enough if you instrument the servers such that they're tracking clients per table. Of course, if you're trying to solve for optimal Drink Refresh Rate, you might need something more granular along the lines of sugar.
link
ksk 4053 days ago
The proxy metric you're looking for is - did the bar have multiple hot women present at the same time as the customer.
link
ksk 4053 days ago
Sure, but those are not the same. "Did you like the food?" can be met with "Could you take it back and add some more salt" or "The steak seems a bit raw, could you fix that?"

Web analytics OTOH, are just aggregations. All the company cares about is some random metric like bounce rate or some "engagement" metric or click through rate or what have you. You can supply a horrible product and still get a temporary boost on any of those metrics. e.g. Redirect 10% of all users to full Page modal ads without a continue button and see the CTR spike. Disallow/hinder copy-paste functionality on the text and watch as people keep coming back.

But you can't bring out a turd on a plate and have the customer be excited about it. If a site I frequented could (impractical, I know) ask me for some direct piece of feedback, and which also had a reasonable chance of being taken seriously, I'd be all for it.

link